Infinity Tournament: Red Star Blues - The Anniversary

 

Back in March, HATE hosted another "Red Star Blues" tournament. The first mission was Resilience Operations, and I was drawn against Heshore who was running Tohaa.

I discarded a card that required me to hold the centre of the field as I felt like two capture territory cards had too much of a risk of being very swingy. I also needed to target HVTs and kill points of my opponent's force.

The early attack from the Tohaa game from Jaan Staar, a special character Impersonator. Heshore was proxying a lot of the Tohaa with Combined Army models as the Tohaa have been out of production for a while now. The proxies were well thought out and pretty obvious as to what was what.

Jaan went on a bit of a rampage, going after my Lieutenant, but fortunately hitting the decoy, not the real one. I eventually managed to take him down before he did too much damage.

It was a very cagey, back and forth game, and we ended up ending the game not knowing who'd pulled off the win! Once we compared objectives and added up points, it turned out it was a 5-5 tie, which felt very fair in the circumstances.

The second game was the old mission Hunting Party, and I was up against Jimrod, running Star Co. Hunting Party is a mission from a previous tournament season that's about immobilising and isolating specialists and Lieutenants.

There was a big core Riot Grrl link team running around pushing buttons and being a terrifying threat...

Unfortunately for Jimrod, I'd taken the Heckler with E/Marat - a large E/M template weapon. I ran him up to them and managed to drop a big template over most of them, but some key models had managed to set up around the corner so weren't caught in the blast...

I spent my third turn running Pi-Well up to drop an E/Marat template over the first Lieutenant who had been knocked unconscious in a previous round. This isolated them and meant I'd "hunted down" more Lieutenants.

Fiddler managed to fight through to get a shot on my Lieutenant, but on the last dice roll of the game, she wasn't immobilised. This meant I won the game 6-5, but if I hadn't won that roll, I'd have lost instead. Another close fought, cagey game that was great fun.

For my final game, it was Supplies against Alicat. It was a punchy looking Tunguska list with a Szalamandra, and I was pretty glad to have won the Lieutenant roll and chosen to go first...

I ran my Heckler up, and had it deploy a Fast Panda, covering both Mary Problems and the Szalamandra. I had Jazz Trinity Mary Problems and take her out, before taking a swing at the Szalamandra...

And I managed to possess the Szalamandra, and in turn, had it walk backwards and shoot up the Interventor who, it turned out, was the Lieutenant.

This was a pretty rough turn for Alicat, but things got much worst! She had two of her back up attack pieces try and take out my Reaktion Zond, and due to a terrifing run of critical hits on my part, both went down...

At this point, you'd think the game was done . . . but no.

On Alicat's second turn, she ran her Vertigo Zond up, and managed to find quite a few creative angles across the table . . . and basically took out every major attack piece I had with area effect missiles catching them in the blast of someone else.

With me having very little left on my third turn, I couldn't get much done, and Alicat was able to get up to capture some boxes and pull a 5-0 win out of the bag, despite an absolutely catastrophicfirst turn!

Overall, I finished 10th out of 18 players - which you'd kind of expect with a win, a loss and a draw. I once more managed to keep my record of comfortable mid-table mediocrity!